The Alcàsser Murders

Three Friends from Alcàsser

Míriam García, Toñi Gómez and Desirée Hernández were schoolgirls from Alcàsser, a small town south of Valencia. Toñi was 15; Míriam and Desirée were 14. On the evening of Friday 13 November 1992 the three friends set out for the Coolor discotheque in neighbouring Picassent, where a party was being held to raise money for their end-of-year school trip. A parent who had planned to drive them was ill, so the girls decided to hitchhike along the short road between the two towns.

They never reached the club. The car that first picked them up broke down less than a kilometre from the club, and the girls walked to a nearby petrol station to look for another lift. Their disappearance drew national attention.

Discovery at La Romana

On 27 January 1993, some 75 days after the girls went missing, two beekeepers came across human remains at a remote spot called La Romana, in the hills near the Tous reservoir. Guardia Civil officers recovered the bodies of all three girls from a partly buried grave. Accounts differ slightly on locating the site: some place it near the Tous dam, others in the Llombai area, about 22 kilometres from Alcàsser.

Investigation and the Escape of Antonio Anglés

On the same day the bodies were found, the Guardia Civil went to the Anglés family home in Catarroja to arrest Antonio Anglés, whom they regarded as the principal perpetrator. He escaped before he could be detained. His associate Miguel Ricart was taken into custody and would remain in prison for about 21 years.

Anglés's trail led abroad. On 18 March 1993 he stowed away on the cargo ship City of Plymouth, which sailed from Lisbon bound for Liverpool. He was discovered aboard, and by the time the ship reached Dublin he had vanished. There has been no confirmed trace of him since.

Trial and Sentence of Miguel Ricart

Ricart was the only person ever tried for the killings. His trial before the Audiencia Provincial de Valencia opened on 12 May 1997, and on 5 September 1997 the court convicted him as a co-perpetrator of the abduction, rape and murder of the three girls, as well as illegal burial, and sentenced him to 170 years in prison. Under the 1973 Penal Code then in force, however, the time a prisoner could actually serve was capped at 30 years.

Around the case grew alternative theories claiming that powerful figures, not Ricart and Anglés, were responsible. These were never accepted by the courts. Fernando García, father of Míriam, and criminologist Juan Ignacio Blanco, leading promoters of such claims, were convicted of slander and defamation in 2009.

Ricart's Release and the Parot Doctrine

In May 2011, at the request of the Asociación Clara Campoamor, the Valencia court applied the so-called Parot doctrine to Ricart, calculating sentence reductions against each individual sentence rather than against the 30-year cap. That pushed his expected release to 2023. On 21 October 2013, however, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights struck down the retroactive use of the doctrine in the case of Inés del Río Prada. Applying that ruling, the Second Section of the Audiencia Provincial de Valencia ordered Ricart's immediate release on 29 November 2013; the prosecution did not oppose it.

In December 2022 he was detained in Barcelona's Raval district on suspicion of drug trafficking and released pending further proceedings. He has publicly claimed innocence; his conviction stands and his sentence is served.

Current Status: A Fugitive Still Sought

Antonio Anglés has never been tried or convicted. He remains a fugitive subject to a search-and-arrest order circulated through Interpol, and he is kept on Interpol and Europol most-wanted lists. In 2021 Spanish police relaunched the international search with digitally aged images of his face. His relatives have repeatedly asked for him to be declared legally dead, but courts have refused, so in law he remains alive.

The case remains open at Court of Instruction No. 6 in Alzira. As reported in 2025 and 2026, his criminal liability will lapse in December 2029 if he is not arrested and extradited before then. Forensic work has continued: a DNA profile attributed to Anglés has been sent abroad for comparison with unidentified remains in Ireland and the United Kingdom linked to the route of the City of Plymouth. Any trial would be held before a jury in Valencia, under the old code's 30-year cap.

Why the Case Still Matters

The Alcàsser case is widely seen as a turning point for Spanish television. When the deaths were confirmed, a live programme presented by Nieves Herrero broadcast the parents' grief from Alcàsser town hall, and talk shows dwelt on the girls' private lives. Critics regard that coverage as the birth of telebasura, or trash TV, in Spain. In 2019 Netflix released El caso Alcàsser, a five-part documentary approved by the victims' families that examined the investigation, the trial and the media, and exposed the weaknesses of the conspiracy claims. Together with Ricart's release after 21 years of a 170-year sentence, the case remains a reference point in Spanish debates over victims' dignity, media ethics and how long the gravest crimes should be punished.